About Ma1function: The Ghost in the Machine

Ma1function: the man, the myth, the legend, the spreadsheet given human form...

Outside our beloved games and adventures of escapism, I am just a humble mechanical engineer from the wonderful city of Huntsville, Alabama. My hobbies include math, spreadsheets, collecting vintage calculators, arranging my pocket protectors, and terribly sarcastic humor... Okay, Jokes aside, I do like math, as well as gaming, costuming, hiking, and tinkering. I was also a huge fan of the Green Arrow before he got an amazing TV show. I enjoy characters that prefer wit and cunning to brute force, as that is a value I respect in my own life. I use the name Ma1function from one of my characters in City of Heroes...okay City of Villains, you got me. He was a seriously sarcastic and sadistic artificial intelligence with a reactor that made a bit too much juice. Aside from this character, some of my favorite creations to date have been:

1) Doran Featherfell (Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, custom campaign)- This character is probably the epitome of what I value in a character. Cunning, opportunistic, and with a soft spot for his teammates, Doran was a kenku, a crow-humanoid, with considerable illusion and enchantment ability. He enjoyed playing pranks on friend and foe alike, and gave our party's desert elf a unshakeable phobia of cephalopods.

A typical kenku, courtesy of Wizards of the Coast

2) Mike Berringer (New World of Darkness, Manitou Springs Pre Written)- Yeah, this one is a pre-written character. I had a great DM for this game and really had a chance to make this character my own. Allow me to introduce to you Mike Berringer, opinionated teenage activist. He runs a somewhat known libertarian political blog and has recently moved to the city of Manitou Springs, Colorado to create a government that even Ron Swanson would be proud of. Oh, and by the way, he is a werewolf and the Iron Masters did a terrible job of teaching him about all of this supernatural stuff.

3) Gimble Gammergow (Dungeons and Dragons 5, Forgotten Realms)- This traveling story writer would introduce himself as "Gimble Gammergow, whimsical wanderer and novice gnome novelist". He is on an eternal quest to find great stories and put them to page, often being motivated only by "what would make a real page turner". Despite the fact that as of this writing he has the highest kill count in the party with that nasty little crossbow of his, he never actually includes himself in his own writings, instead attributing all of his heroic achievements to his allies, who will never fail to find themselves caricatured and aggrandized on the page.

4) Sees-in-Shadow (Elder Scrolls Online, Ebonheart pact, North America)- Nis-Ixir, or Sees in Shadow in the common tongue, is an elderly Argonian and a proud scholar in the Mage's Guild. He loves his work as a lecturer and healer, and has a tribe that he cares for deeply. The only problem is, he's dead, and has been for about four years. After an ambush at the research site of Nen-Ria, Sees in Shadow succumbed to Noxiphilic Sanguivoria (Vampirism) and is now having to adjust to an existence of self-loathing as he weighs a guilty conscience against a fear of an eternity of torment at the hands of Molag-Bal.

5) Count Nicolai Belmonte (City of Heroes, Virtue)- One of the few characters I had that was not a robot, Count Belmonte was a 16th century French aristocrat who just so happened to be immortal due to a demon, Naragesh, who shared his body. As a tribute to the DC comics character Etrigan, Nicolai could give Naragesh control temporarily through the use of a rhyme, as part of an agreement to cooperate they had reached over the centuries, and he had it out for the sorcerers of the circle of thorns.